Online Marketing, SEO & Tech.

Monthly Archives: June 2007

It doesn’t matter if you’ve started blogging years ago or if you recently started; at one point you will get bored with blogging. At the moment I have had a 2 week break and really have to force myself to write this post. Blogging has lost the charm all new things have and seems more like a task now. This must be the make or break point for a blog. I have seen some great things happen in my short blogging career and think I miss the rush of getting an article featured on the front-page of Digg or Reddit or getting 50+ backlinks overnight. I’m used to raise the bar too high and find it hard to deal with what in my eyes seems like a big loss. For example: I can have 200 RSS readers today, 300 tomorrow and if I have 299 the day after … I’ll be bummed I lost one reader even-though I’ve gained 99. Hope that’s an example that makes sense

I’ve decided for now not to participate in any meme’s like the Feed My Feed, ViraLink and Technorati Fave Train because they are nothing more than a sugar rush really. If I want this blog to be taken serious and have a shot at becoming an A-lister (what did I say about me and raising bars again?) I feel that I need to deserve the traffic in an honest way. Having said that, I don’t judge the people who are using these memes but my personal goal has changed somewhat and I think that gaining numbers like this will not provide a solid base for my blog to work from. I’ve found out that there is no fast and easy “getting rich online” scheme that works. Blogging is hard work and by manipulating the numbers you will probably end up fooling yourself.

If your new to the game you’ll probably stumble across some popular money making blogs and get the idea that anyone with a blog can make loads of money online. I can tell you now; Snap out of it, not gonna happen. Not overnight anyway.
Ask yourself; There’s over 70.000.000 bloggers out there, how many do you know that make enough money blogging to quit their regular jobs?
From a personal perspective I don’t need to make money online, it’s more the challenge to see if I can. There is money to be made on the Internet for sure but it requires a lot of hard work and some luck. I am making money online but the percentage this blog contributes to the total sum is negligible.
Bored or not, I’ll keep going because I have invested a lot of time already in this blog and its a great learning experience. I’m certain there are many more rushes to come and in the meantime your just gonna have to put up with me

Last week was an interesting situation which gave me valuable insights in how a blog performs with no new input. As you might know, I’m currently on holiday and have limited access to the Internet. For the last week I have not been able to post and as to be expected, slowly but surely all the statistics are dropping across the board. A quick breakdown:
Alexa has always been a bit flaky and not quite accurate since it will only measure your site depending if readers have the Alex Toolbar installed, but the drop right at the end of the screen shot is around the time I stopped posting. (The peak in the beginning is courtesy of Digg by the way).

I was going to post more stats but then remembered I’m still on holidays! It’s quite hard to write a new post if you haven’t done one in so long A few of the things I could have done to prevent this:

Don’t go traveling but stay home to blog!

Prepare a few posts before you leave and publish one from draft every day. Just set your posts timestamp in the future and hit Publish. Your post will get online as soon as the time stamp’s date is there.

Ask another blogger to do a guest post if they are not too busy.

I didn’t bother with any of these because I have faith in my readers, coming back when I do. Besides, I couldn’t use the time stamp feature if my life depended on it, as soon as I finish writing a post I get all excited about it and publish it straight away anyway. (Not the smartest thing to do either since I’m not in the same timezone as my main readers group, we have about 8 hours between us which gives my post plenty of time to get buried on social bookmark, or blog update sites).

Sheesh, this post was really hard to write, it felt like my first post ever. Remember to blog consistently, try to write a post atleast once a day. If not for your statistics, do it to keep in shape. The less you do it, the harder it gets. And I should learn to follow my own advice from time to time! Remember that getting a blog popular is hard work but keeping it up there is even harder.

It’s 22:00 and I have spend most part of the day getting PHP, MySQL, Apache and WP2.2 running on my Apple. The reason behind this is that I want to try and create my own WP theme. This way I can take my macbook anywhere, writing and testing code on my local installation. It’s not perfect yet, I ran into troubles at first when PHPMyAdmin couldn’t handle the size of the bobmeetsworld.com database. Took me a little while to figure out you need to edit the PHP.INI file and set upload_max_filesize higher than the default 2M. But then of course, I couldn’t get it accepting anything bigger than 8M even though I had set the limit to 30M. Finally I used ./mysql -uroot wordpress < /Users/me/Desktop/Sites/Bobmeetsworld/backup/6-6-7bob_wordpress.sql to import the database with success.

All done right? Wrong! Because I use pretty permalinks, anything I click on locally redirects to this online blog. After spending an hour, trying to fix the Apache VirtualHost settings I gave up. After all; I don’t really need to have an exact copy of this blog, an empty one will do just as well. Allforces helped me quite a bit with an excellent tutorial.

If you’re interested in taking your technical blogging skills to a higher level, I recommend you to try this at home. Besides the obvious benefits of self improvement, you can make your blog stand out, save money by not having to buy a custom design. Even make money by selling your themes! If you decide to give them away for free, remember you can get an abundance of linkbacks to your own blog simply by adding a link in the footer of the theme. All in all this was a fun learning experience. Next issue at hand; Trying to get the Ultimate Tag Warrior working again on WP2.2. Oh, and I’m sorry about the technical Mumbo Jumbo, I know that’s not what you expect on here!